An Entrepreneur Who Cares, by Jeffrey Gangemi

Thursday, June 16, 2005

Jeff Skoll earned his wealth as the first president of eBay. Now, he looks for ways that business can change the world for the betterJeff Skoll thinks — and cares — big. He caught the entrepreneurial bug long before 1995, the year he earned his MBA at Stanford University Graduate School of Business and became the first president of eBay, the online-auction site. This was after he had already launched two of his own computer consulting and rental businesses.

A serious back problem inhibited Skoll’s ability to work the long hours that eBay required — and was good motivation to take his work in another direction. In 1999, as Skoll prepared to step away from eBay’s day-to-day operations, he started the Skoll Foundation, which supports the field of social entrepreneurship, or the use of business ideas to affect social change. Throughout the transition, Skoll maintained his ties to the MBA world by serving on Stanford’s board of advisers and eventually, in 2004, opening the Skoll Center for Social Entrepreneurship at the University of Oxford Sa?d Business School in Britain.

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